Vintage Nudes, Restored
Two days ago I got a very good marketing email. This man pegged it, with brevity, clarity, simplicity and most importantly, with being on target about something I’m actually interested in here at Eros Blog, which is vintage nude photographs:
Hi!
I wanted to share a personal project that I thought you might like. A few years ago I started restoring nude 1950s pinups – I posted the restorations and the backstory at www.50nudes.com. I hope you enjoy the photos.
Cheers!
The only reason this is a “very good” marketing email instead of a “perfect” marketing email is the “personal project” terminology. While doubtless true — the restoration work is obviously a labor of love – the fellow is selling fine art prints of his work. I don’t think our man was trying to fudge that obvious commercial fact, but to make this the truly perfect marketing email, he might perhaps have omitted the word “personal”. But that’s just a style point; the judges at this point are arguing about whether it’s a 9.8 or a perfect 10.
His restoration work itself is beautiful, as these before-and-after details will show you:
I love that he’s included nice scans of his originals for comparison to the restorations, too.
On the other hand, I heartily dislike the fact that he’s blasted his logo across the originals, thus despoiling artifacts that are not his own creative work and appearing to claim something that’s not his to claim. But that’s a sin virtually everyone in the vintage photo business commits when they go online. It’s also a recognized peeve of mine, that I can and will be crochety about as a vintage image collector, without investing my cranky reaction with too much emotional weight.
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=4275
I wonder what kind of due diligence he’s performed on the copyrights to these photographs. I doubt that the restorations he’s performed would be considered transformative, and thus allowable under Fair Use, in a court of law, in the (extremely unlikely, I admit) event that one of the original photographers were to file a claim.
Well, anon, it’s important to remember that a great many vintage erotic photographs were published fairly anonymously, because the legal and erotic risks were so great. It’s surely the case that each of these images has a copyright owner, but in most cases that owner is not discoverable, and in many cases, is probably an unknowing heir. So, as you say, claims are unlikely.
But that is, indeed, one of the reason I get grumpy when I see somebody (who is not the photographer or copyright owner) slapping their logo all over a vintage image. Use it, share it, rescue it from oblivion — I believe in all of these and consider it a great pity that our copyright laws are so badly broken with respect to such activities. But claim it by scribbling your name across it? That bothers me.
How about the restorations? Do you think he has the right to put his logo on them? And you are sooo lucky that you get emails like this. All I get is spam… On the other hand, I don’t maintain an amazing blog like yours.
It’s not really about rights, Anne. Once we’re talking about what people are doing with intellectual property they didn’t create, it’s more like ethics or manners than a rights question. And there’s a lot his intellectual property in the restorations, so I don’t have a problem with his logos on those — they are, in a substantial if partial sense, his creation, even if the copyright law might not acknowledge that.
But the original scans? To my eye, slapping your logo on somebody else’s photo is kinda rude.
I routinely crop, rotate, filter, and do minor cleanup on the old images I post on ErosBlog. And these images are routinely “stolen” by other blogs, often without any credit back here. The temptation to slap an ErosBlog logo on these things is always strong in me. But it just doesn’t feel right, because there’s more in the work that I didn’t create than there is that I did. But we’re talking usually a few minute’s improvement work. If I spent many painstaking hours, I might feel differently.
Hi Bacchus,
You’ve made a great point with regards to the original scans – they are no more mine than they are yours, or anyone else in the public domain. I’ve replaced the images with non-watermarked versions.
Best regards,
John
Awesome, thank you!